Unethical Boss Pushed For A Shady Deal, But The Employee’s Paper Trail Led To The Boss’ Downfall » TwistedSifter

Cutting corners at work can come at a steep cost, especially in industries that require precision.

When one executive instructed their employee to manipulate prices for a larger sale, the estimator wisely requested the directive in writing, sparking a chain of events that exposed the boss’ unethical conduct and led to a career-ending scandal.

Read on for the full story.

I used to work as a spare parts estimator for a fairly niche industry.

My job was essentially to work out what parts of our main product the customer wanted, find out how much it would cost us to make, add a little mark up, and send them a quote.

The job required a fine attention to detail and thorough documentation.

My boss was pretty strict on traceability, so everything needed to be recorded, including why a certain mark up had been applied to a particular product.

The normal value of these quotes is somewhere between £200 and a few hundred thousand. Very rarely do we get orders for anything more than that (once or twice a decade in my experience).

But one day, a request unlike any other came across their desk.

A request for quotation landed on my desk when I was WFH during Covid, and it was a biggy.

Just looking at the list of parts the customer wanted, this was going to be an absolute killer, over a million pounds all by itself.

A lot was riding on the estimator getting this job right.

I was told by the sales guy that if this one went well, there was another to follow of an even bigger size, ultimately looking at ten million over the next four years.

So I set to work.

So the estimator worked tirelessly to get it all done.

Normally, I can do five or six of these quotes in a day, but this one quote took me six weeks to put together.

I was in constant contact with 20+ vendors, getting specifications, technical details, prices, and lead times for over four hundred items.

Finally, my masterpiece was complete. Then came the snag.

But then the sales guy threw a bit of a curveball.

The sales guy then says that because of the country this customer is in, they need to have four or more quotes in from different customers to get it cleared by their government (some anti-corruption policy that had been instituted).

We were the OEM of the product and there’s nowhere else on the planet they could get these parts from, so we’d have to work through third parties to get it done, and he knew just the guy.

But the sales guy has a guy in mind he’s determined to work with.

In comes a one-man band with a dodgy looking entry at companies house to save the day.

The sales guy and him go way back, so he was going to be the “preferential supplier.”

Here’s where things started getting messy.

I was asked to do the normal quote to him, then to bump the prices up by 30% and send that to three other companies who had been asking about it so they would absolutely not get the contract with the end user.

The estimator tries to push back, but their bosses insist.

I argued the point, saying that the whole purpose of the anti-corruption policy is to prevent situations exactly like this, but I was overruled.

So they’re sure to leave a paper trial for this shady deal.

The COO of the company now tells me to just do it over a phone call, at which point I request that in writing before I go ahead and do it.

So then one day, the consequences started coming in.

Fast forward two years, and there’s still no order placed.

Then I find out through a different sales guy that the One Man Band has been put on a blacklist by this country’s government over this project.

The other three companies have been turned down, and the end user is asking other companies to come in and take our product out and replace it with their own.

This led to an even bigger reckoning within the company.

A huge investigation is called for by senior management, my quote is ripped to pieces and examined in microscopic detail.

Suddenly the estimator is in the hot seat.

The question gets asked, “Why did you give different prices to these other three when you knew it was all to do with anti-corruption? We should fire you! That’s millions of pounds of order you’ve lost us!”

Luckily, they’re about to pull out their secret weapon!

Out comes the email from my little black book, on the desk it goes, everyone suddenly gets veeeeeery quiet, and the COO starts packing his desk in a box the next week.

And the moral of the story is, if someone tells you to do something borderline illegal, make sure to get it in writing.

There you have it: Always get it in writing, folks!

What did Reddit think?

If this executive knew what was good for him, he would have taken his employee’s request for a paper trail as a warning.

This phrase would make any corporate worker shudder.

This commenter is surprised the story actually benefitted the little guy and not the execs.

This reader appreciates a thorough story like this one.

This paper trail did way more than just keep the estimator out of trouble – it led to his boss’ downfall!

In the corporate world, a paper trail is the ultimate trump card.

If you liked that post, check out this story about a guy who was forced to sleep on the couch at his wife’s family’s house, so he went to a hotel instead.